


Freight Car

by baudlairean



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Blood and Violence, Captain America: Civil War (Movie) Spoilers, Sort of fix-it, Spoilers, in which bucky runs a lot and hopefully drinks some tea, or do they, somebody's got to get those trigger phrases out
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-05-15
Updated: 2016-05-15
Packaged: 2018-06-08 12:45:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,492
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6855226
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/baudlairean/pseuds/baudlairean
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>There might come a time in the next few years when you need help, and you can’t go to the person closest to you. If that day comes, visit Tangier. There is a bar there called the Juniper Blossom. You’ll like it.</i> Six months later, Bucky Barnes wakes up, then runs. <i>Post-Civil-War Fixit(?) Fic. WIP. In which Bucky fights people, Tony is sassy, and awkward misfits make new friends.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Freight Car

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: Blood, violence, swearing, reference to brainwashing/torture.

He swallows.

Swallowing is all you can do when the tube is in your mouth. You swallow to try to bring it further down. It’s a reflexive response to an obstruction in the throat. Your body tries to rid itself of the obstacle.

The human mind works much the same way as the reflex to swallow. Give it an obstacle, and it will press it down. Present it with a difficulty, and it will fight to absorb it. Place a stone in the tissue, and watch the body grow around it, try to eject it, and fail.

The words, they go like this: грузовой автомобиль, оранжевый, никто. What is the sequence for?

Why write it down in a book, anyway?

 

 

 

Blue lights.

Cop car? Law enforcement? He can’t hear anything. He’s deaf, and he’s - cold. The world is a blur of frost. He thinks he can feel his eyes clicking when they spin to the left, make out a human blur pounding on a console.

 

**6:44 PM, CENTRAL WAKANDA**

 

This isn’t the smooth awakening of a night of long sleep. This is the wake up call of a shrieking siren. He can hear it as soon as the base of the clear pod parts from the floor with a satisfied hiss, the kiss of rubber peeling from titanium. He flexes his fingers. He can feel them, but nothing else. He feels them flex on both sides. He knows the arm is gone, but his brain doesn't. They disagree on a lot of things, come to think of it.

Before he went under, a kind nurse tucked the mess of wires on his left side under a clean black cap. Like an old fashioned nightcap, he thought, while he watched her do it. Like the old folks wore when he was a kid. Putting old metal away, making it neat. Things were very neat, in Wakanda.

Not now. The blue lights pulsing at him are the emergency lights, flashing high in the ceiling and tracing a path along the floor toward the exit. The overhead lights are out, it’s dark, and there is a crush of panicked people in the hall. Here in the lab, a man and a woman are firing away at the consoles as fast as they can. The woman comes near him, just as his eyes are finally regaining their ability to focus. The sirens are so loud he can feel the sound ricochet around the inside of his skull.

“What.”

She begins unbuckling the straps that hold him down. “We must go now,” she says. She shouts above the din of the alarm, but she is calm. Her hair is cropped short, and she wears two small gold hoops in each ear. They catch the light and turn blue in the dim room. “Come.”

She levers him up - he isn’t light, and he tries to take a step and ask questions at the same time. “What’s happening?” His phantom fingers clench, and his ankle rolls the moment it hits the floor, his muscles too weak to support him yet. He swears, catches himself with - nope, Barnes, what’re you doing, you’ve got no left arm to catch with.

He hits the ground and rolls, pain spiking up through the plate screwed into his shoulder blade. He rolls over, begins pushing himself up again. There’s no time for this. No time for adjustment, no time to relearn atrophied legs. The shriek of the siren is making his head pound.

“ _Help me!_ ” the woman shouts over her shoulder. He understands the language. He is awake enough to feel a dull surprise. Why should he be surprised he knows anything he didn’t know he knew, anymore? There are more languages crammed into his head than he knows what to do with. Xhosa. They're speaking Xhosa, his brain informs him. His body is trying to get up, but his thoughts are still stretching and drowsy after being under the ice, cracking through the barriers of frost between neurons.

He’s on his feet, somehow - the woman helped him up, and the man tosses Bucky's arm casually over his own shoulder.

Out the door they go. He limps - the right leg is coming back, the left still numb - and glances behind them just in time to feel an explosion on the south side of the building. Glass and orange light spray into his field of vision. The evacuees scream and duck, and some begin sprinting for the exit, pushing the others aside.

 _“Me?”_ he asks the woman. In Xhosa. She doesn’t even seem surprised.

“ _You._ ” 

They were always going to find him.

Around them, doctors are wheeling patients away from the chaos. There are children, some crying, being dragged down the hall by their parents and their nurses. There are officials, and there are men and women in uniform, pointing the way toward the clearly labeled exit. Nothing if not efficient, this place, even in a panic.

Bucky and his two companions begin to pick up speed. They near the elevators, then continue past them, into the dark hallway beyond, around a corner.

There is no one in this hall. No one is coming this far, they're all stopping at the elevator bank. The emergency lights here are weak, pulsing weakly on just one side.

“ _Not the elevators?”_ he asks.

The woman doesn’t answer. He looks right, and the man’s hand is in his pocket.

Bucky reaches behind him, grasps the man’s hand on his neck, and twists it backward. The man cries out sharply as his wrists cracks, loud enough to be heard over the ever-present sirens and the din of evacuees behind them. In the dark he is ducking his head, even as the woman on his left is swinging her hand toward his neck in an arc. He catches a glimpse of thin silver, identifies it as a needle, and even marks the color of the contents (white).

He drives her body into the side of the hall. She catches the back of his leg with her own, but drops the needle. It rolls, he doesn’t see where. He flips her, and they both go down - the man comes up from behind and he strikes back hard as the woman pulls her knee between them. He slams his forehead into hers, and sees blood seep into the corner of one of her rolling eyes. He wheels on his knees and strikes the man once, twice.

These aren’t fighters. Trained in basic self-defense, but fighters? Maybe the woman, certainly not the man. He hits the floor hard, while the woman is still trying her damndest to get up off the floor.

He pushes away from her and spots the syringe. It rolled toward the track in the floor where the blue lights are flashing in sequence. When the illumination passes beneath the white liquid, he can see a grainy substance suspended in it.

He pockets it.

Then he runs. This facility is the height of Wakandan technology, so the stairs are tucked away discreetly, lit with a sign flashing in the same blue as the emergency lights. He tries the handle. Locked, probably as soon as the emergency signal went through the building.

He gives it a sharp kick. He can see the man moving in the corner of his eye. Is that a taser?

He doesn’t look left. The door bangs open, slams into the opposite wall, and he goes through it just in time for a dart to pass an inch behind him.

Up, not down. He takes the stairs three at a time. His legs are pins and needles all over, but they're working again, so that’s an improvement.

Second landing from the top, there’s a guard in uniform, squinting into the half-dark. He pulls a gun, but that’s alright. Bucky neatly disarms him, throwing the weapon down the steps. He breaks the man’s nose, solar plexus, swiftly punches him into the wall. He slides to the ground, inert.

He peers over the edge of the stair, pulls back sharply when gunfire sprays up from the gap. No going back.

He dashes through the door on the landing. This is the top floor. The Wakandans keep their air ambulances here, sleek white and lined up in a row in front of him. He noted the bay from the ground when he first came here, just in case. He wanted to be sure he had an escape route. He thought he caught T'challa watching him do it, but the King had said nothing.

How long ago was that?

How long has it been?

There are four men in the bay. They haven’t fled, so they were paid off too, or blackmailed, or threatened. Whatever it was, he makes sure they know it wasn't enough. 

The first tries to take him as he comes through the door, so he kicks the man’s weapon into his face, breaking his jaw and knocking him out clean. He falls back like a cartoon, legs and arms splayed, and Bucky hits the next man at a solid run. He puts the second man between himself and the third, who is firing a large automatic weapon, bullets Bucky no longer hears over the white noise of the siren.

The bullets embed in the man’s body armor, and Bucky gives him a swift kick, sending him flying into his friend. That done, man number four has advanced from behind with a wire - a garotte, how old fashioned - and he’s whipping it around Bucky’s neck.

Bucky ducks, pivots and _throws_ the man off him as hard as he can. The guard's wrists can’t take the shifting angle, and his grip on the wire breaks. 

He makes the forty feet to the chopper in under five seconds, slides in at a half-run. He’s never touched Wakandan tech. He knew Xhosa, but not this. If he was going to have unpredictable talents, couldn’t they be a little more. Helpful?

There is a flat black screen in front of him, no buttons. He places his right hand down on it, flat. The screen reads his prints and offers an identity.

_T’CHALLA, CROWN PRINCE OF THE KINGDOM OF WAKANDA_

He has someone to thank, later.

  
  


**KINGDOM OF WAKANDA TERROR ATTACK - 14 DEAD**

 

 _Central Wakanda -_ A terror attack on the reclusive nation of Wakanda today left 14 Wakandans dead. While facts about the attack have been slow to leave the country, cell phone footage supplied by a visiting journalist has identified the target of the attack as a local medical center. Wakanda itself has not officially reported the attack to the United Nations, and no known terrorist organization has taken responsibility at this hour.

  


_“General Ross. You have been on hold for: 2 days, 18 hrs. 4 min., 27 sec.”_

“Why do you needle him like that?”

**2:21 AM, AVENGERS COMPOUND**

See, here’s the problem with Rhodey. Rhodey, he’s got great eyes. Crap taste in women, crap taste in whiskey, but great eyes. He can see the little red light blinking on Tony’s phone from where he’s standing in the doorway, brow arched. He’s wearing the legs Tony built, and they glow softly, lighting up the dark office brighter than the moonlight coming through the back window. There’s sweat beading on his brow, so he’s been practicing with them.

“Shouldn’t you be sleeping?” Tony has a magazine draped delicately over his face. He reaches up to lift a corner, so one eye is peering at Rhodey. “I was.”

He groans, and pulls the magazine from where it was splayed, lays it flat on the desk. The friendly underarm deodorant model on the page that was resting against the bridge of his nose seems to be winking at him.

“I was having this dream, it was pretty great, you know those dreams where you sleep with celebrities? Somebody who wouldn’t give you the time of day, ordinarily? Well I have the opposite, obviously, so my dreams are always about waking up in bed next to myself. Do you think that says something about my personality?”

“Tony.”

“Please tell me, Dr. Freud. Interpret my dreams, if you’re going to interrupt them all the time.”

“You can’t leave Ross hanging forever.”

“But I can.” Both brows up. “Oh, I can. He’s been _cordially_ informed that I’m in, ah, Russia? I think. I can’t be expected to keep track of the lies my assistant tells people.”

Rhodes breaks from the doorway and steps slowly into the room. He’s still mastering the balance of the legs, but the few short steps unassisted is a major improvement all by itself. Tony feels a tiny burst of glee in his chest, and it shows on his face. Rhodes puts out a hand. “Uh-uh. No. No stats, no reports on the legs, no notes. Not unless you tell me why you’re screening Ross’s calls, aside from the fact that he’s a major asshole.”

Tony pouts.

“Not before.”

Tony sighs. “I saw him calling, and a had a feeling.” He gestures, expansively, to the phone. “I had a _feeling_ about what I was going to hear if I picked it up.”

“Not a knowing.”

“Nope.” Crisp, immediate. He smiles. “Just a feeling.”

“Then go to bed. It’s two in the morning.”

“You go to bed.” Tony points a finger gun at his friend, pinches his thumb down to fire it.  _Gotcha._

Rhodes rolls his eyes and turns for the door. It takes three steps for him to turn 180 degrees. Tony watches, marks where his feet land. The legs aren’t as flexible as they should be. They don’t handle side-steps as well as he wants. Right now Rhodey walks like a mech in a bad Japanese cartoon, rigid and inflexible, and that just won’t fly, not in the long run. Although the legs do, in fact, fly.

“You’re making notes,” Rhodes says, as he grabs the door frame. “And looking at my ass.”

“How could you tell?"

“I turned around and it got quiet.” He waves a hand. “I'm used to it. Don’t mind me. Enjoy the view. And call Ross.”

Tony leans over the edge of the chair, watching the glowing disks on the legs retreating into the darkness of the compound.

“I’ll bring you some warm milk in a minute and tuck you back in.”

“Fuck yourself.”

Tony covers his face with the magazine again, and he chuckles at the deodorant model.

  


Bucky has a dream.

**3:36 AM, LENINGRAD, 1968**

It’s 3:36 AM in Leningrad, and the blonde he was sent for is bleeding on the floor. She is still jerking. He picked her up at a local bar. He charmed her. Her blood pools under her in cloudy pulses, dark scarlet thinning to nearly pink where it trails across white kitchen linoleum. There is a cross hanging over her kitchen table.

He doesn’t know what stops him. He needs to strip her body and take the knife to the home of an ex-KGB officer two blocks from here. He used an assistant’s name to pay for his mistress’s apartment, but that won’t save him from a murder charge.

He stops. His eyes have caught on the cross on the wall.

There’s nothing remarkable about it, and he analyzes his thoughts for irregularities, stares at the cross a little more. Why is he looking at it? Does he think she could have hidden something inside?

He pulls it down off the wall, checks the back. Plain wood, with a small divot at the top so it may be hung on a nail. He replaces it, and his fingers hover there, almost touching.

He has become fixated on it. There is no logical reason, and he will need to report this to his handler when he meets him for extraction.

His tongue is warm and thick. He can almost taste the knowing. There is a cross. It hangs over a bare kitchen table, in a kitchen with a white floor.

He kneels down, tears his eyes from the meaningless object, and begins to pull off the woman’s well-worn black heels.

  


Bucky wakes up.

He tests his fingers, drumming them against the floor, one after another. He wasn’t screaming this time.

**TANGIER, 1 DAY LATER**

The brick is beginning to warm under his skin. The sun is up. He checks his side with his fingertips, and they come away bloody. He should have seen one of the guards catch him with a knife as he was fighting his way to the plane, but it took an hour for the blood seeping through his clothes to draw his notice

The plane is gone. Wakandan vessels are distinctive, and it wasn’t going to get him all the way to his destination. It’s smoldering in the hills a country behind him.

He pulls a fresh bandage from the bag, peeled the one stuck to his side away, and winces. The blood dried a little in the night. He places the fresh bandage down in the place of the old, feeling the edges of the adhesive with his fingertips, pressing them down. He couldn’t take the plane all the way to Morocco, but its supplies are helping him, even now. The flight suit in the back had given him roughly a hundred mile head start on anyone tracking the plane, whipping through the night air like a stocky, angry glider.

And he is angry.

He rolls to his knees, grunts, drops his shirt over the bandage. He shoulders his pack, a med bag from the plane dirtied with enough mud and grit to hide its distinguishing marks. The rooftop of the bar smells like someone’s last-night vomit in the alley mingled with cooking breakfast in the owner’s apartment beneath his feet. Eggs, maybe?

He fixes his fingers on the lip of the roof and drops carefully over the side. The wound is on his right side, which means all the weight of him pulling at the gash under the bandage.

He hits the ground quietly, checks the edge of the building. The smell is stronger now that he’s on the ground, but the breakfast upstairs still smells appetizing. It’s been a day since he last ate anything. Legs still shaky from the ice, injured side aching, and a bruise on his temple from where he smashed it into the woman’s forehead. Give it two days, and all of it will be gone.

He wears a black scarf across his neck, hanging loosely over the empty left side of his body. He can blend - even now, with everything he’s done in the eye of the world, he can blend.

In a crack in the wall near the corner of the bar, he finds what he’s looking for. It is a small slip of paper, no bigger than his fingernail, bearing an address in English.

He steps into the street, and moves with the crowds just as the morning call to prayer begins to ring out.

  
  


The target building is squat and low, and the side that faces the sun is painted the pale blue of shallow seawater. Women are hanging laundry and herding their children, and men are drinking coffee by the wall. The houses are well-kept and a little larger than the average.

Bucky walks around to the back of the building, sliding down a narrow passageway. He reaches a gate with a camera.

He waits. The gate buzzes, and its latch opens.

He steps inside, shutting the gate behind him, and moves deeper into the alley, further into the shadow, further from the sunsoaked street.

Around the back of the building is a courtyard, closed in on all sides by white walls three stories tall. There is a raised bed filled with small flowers, and a palm tree stretching toward the square of sun above.

Bucky stands at the back doorway. He does not knock, or scale the wall, or kick the door in. He waits.

The wooden door behind the wrought-iron grate swings open.

  


_Dear Mr. Barnes,_

**PLANE OVER THE ATLANTIC OCEAN, 10:14 AM, SIX MONTHS EARLIER**

The words blink at him from his phone screen. They roll through in the messaging app as smoothly as any ordinary text, but Bucky knows this trick. Someone has hacked the phone. Every text reads as if he is texting his own number, and it appears over and over again in the cheerful bubbles where the sender's name should be.

_There might come a time in the next few years when you need help, and you can’t go to the person closest to you. If that day comes, visit Tangier. There's a bar there called the Juniper Blossom. You’ll like it._

__-Bb_ _

 

 

The face behind the grate is clean-shaven and well-rested, but there is a haunted look in the eyes that Bucky recognizes.

“I have food." Knowing, polite. Like he’s tempting in a stray.

Bucky nods, and Banner moves out of the doorway.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comments and thoughts appreciated for WIP-continuing motivation. Why isn't Bruce in Asgard, you ask? Where is Steve? Why is General Ross so cranky?
> 
> I've got a few ideas.


End file.
